The Cadence Academic Network helps build strong relationships between academia and industry, and promotes the proliferation of leading-edge technologies and methodologies at universities renowned for their engineering and design excellence.

A huge knowledge exchange platform for academia to network with industry. We are looking for academic speakers to talk about their research to the industry attendees at the Academic Track at CDNLive EMEA and Silicon Valley.

News From the IP '08 Conference

My colleagues on the Verification IP
team have been honored to present at the annual "IP '08" conference
this week in Grenoble, France. Unfortunately for me
I'm not able to attend (hence no photo blog or video; sorry), but my colleague Pete
Heller in the Verification IP group has offered to relay the following news
about this growing event.

Q. [Joe] What is IP'08?
A. [Pete] IP'08 is an annual conference put on by Design and Reuse, a
leading IP information clearing house based in France. The show focuses on
IP design, verification and reuse as well as business issues relating to IP
(design IP and verification IP). See http://www.design-reuse.com/ip08/program/
for more details.

Q. [Joe] Please tell me more about the conference host, "Design and
Reuse"?
A. [Pete] Design and Reuse (D&R) D&R provides a global
collaboration network for sharing design resources in the electronics SoC
industry. They point out that they are "the world's
largest directory of 6,500 Silicon IPs from more than 400
vendors". (See http://www.design-reuse.com for
more info.)

Q. [Joe] Why is Cadence presenting at IP'08?A. [Pete] With the October
announcement of the 5X expansion of Cadence's VIP portfolio, we are now the
leading supplier of verification IP with
the greatest product breadth (no kidding -- recall that we support over
30 protocols now). As such, IP'08 is an excellent venue
for Cadence to show off the new, expanded portfolio to decision makers involved
with IP selection.

Q: [Joe] What papers are we presenting at IP'08?
A: [Pete] Cadence is presenting three papers. The first,
"Automating Protocol Compliance Verification Using Metric Driven
Verification" explains a unique capability of Cadence ' s
Verification IP (VIP), the "Compliance Management System" (a/k/a
"CMS") included with our VIPs. This paper describes why it is
needed and how it works.

The second, "Learning Not to Fear
PCI Express Compliance Using a Predictable, Metrics Driven Methodology"
represents work done by one of our customers, ClearSpeed(tm),
based in the UK. It provides an excellent explanation about the
motivation for using a metric-driven approach as well as the excellent results
ClearSpeed achieved (over 95% functional coverage for PCI Express).

Last but not least, we are also sharing
some best practices in embedded software IP verification, in a paper aptly
titled "Embedded Software IP Verification". In a nutshell, the
embedded software world has been seriously lagging the hardware/ASIC
development world in recognizing the ROI of VIP, but things like the now
infamous iPhone call dropping problem that was found to be caused by a firmware
bug is inspiring new thinking in this space.

Gabriele, our newest solutions engineer, will deliver the presentations on metric-driven VIP automation
and PCI Express. Gabriele came to us from Yogitech, the original supplier
of the OCP UVC now owned by Cadence. Gabriele has a very strong
background in verification in general, architecting and packaging UVCs in
specific, and he also happens to live in Southern France, so
he is an ideal person to represent Team VIP.

Q: [Joe] OK, last question, and your chance to give your best Cadence
VIP elevator pitch: what distinguishes Cadence's VIP from other offerings?A: [Pete] Several things -- the most important differentiators are
found in the sheer number of protocols
supported and the depth of Cadence VIP’s functionality and automation. This
includes:

[Joe] I'm sold -- I'll take one of everything! Where do I fax the PO? :-)

Thanks Pete for this briefing on IP '08!

In the near future I'll post debrief interviews of Gabriele and Markus
on their impressions of the event in general, as well as what specific
concerns they heard from attendees about their IP and verification challenges.